Paul M. Davishttp://paulmdavis.com
Sat, 24 Sep 2016 13:07:05 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1New Podcast: Megaten Marathonhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/H98a8d7yfYQ/
Thu, 25 Aug 2016 16:55:53 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=2034subscribe on iTunes or most podcatchers, and visit the website to learn more.]]>http://paulmdavis.com/pmdblog/2016/new-podcast-megaten-marathon/The Exhilaration of Failurehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/sXeJpR5CnO8/
Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:54:05 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1899What fascinates me about high-profile failures such as Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” isn’t the question, “how did this great artist go so far off the reservation?” Rather, it’s unpacking the eccentricities of creation — how someone who is capable of making resonant, effective work can knowingly take the risk of failure, of experimentation, with knowledge of the risk of rejection, even hatred.

Nowadays, there’s a language for taking those risks: creators are (hopefully) aware that their work is subject to near-instantaneous criticism. It’s not unlike performance, in its many permutations: take risks, perform to your greatest ability and preparation, and learn from the failures.

This is encouraged in a lot of inspirational writing, but it’s rarely embraced. The expectation and perception remains that our creative products represent us in some unchanging way, because they’re eternally digitally preserved. Which is constricting, unless you decide “I don’t give a fuck” and hope that your mistakes will be washed away by the firehose. Which, as machine learning and data science grow ever more sophisticated, is increasingly unlikely.

In proto-Fox News style, Buckley attempts to undermine Borges with the claim, “his critics disagree
on the proposition that [his work] will survive the century.”

Buckley goes on to minimize Borges’s views as being those of some provincial Argentinian eccentric. Borges responds with grace and class.

In short, we’ve been equally wonderful and horrible, seemingly forever. But at least some of the heroic figures persist, outlast their critics, and even illuminate their critics’ failed dominance over history, when given sufficient time and a wide vantage point.

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/pmdblog/2014/jorge-luis-borges-pwns-william-f-buckley-jr-circa-1977/On SXSW Hangovers, Both Literal and Figurativehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/iVix2MDGTc8/
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 22:20:00 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1924There are various types or SXSW hangovers: literal hangovers, recovering from 5-10 days of drinking; health hangovers, the result of being in a teeming vector for infection; and an intangible type of hangover which is far more difficult to parse.

Even for those of us who view SXSW with a gimlet eye — and particularly those of us who live here, and have to put up with the drunkenness spilling onto our front lawns when we’re long sick of its novelty — there’s an energy to the conference which is sickly addictive. And a sense of loss when it’s gone.

Amid the ridiculous marketing and idiots behaving like it’s like it’s their last weekend out, there are the thoughtful people who we usually connect with only via email or Hangouts or never. For a few days, there is an incredible concentration of smart, motivated, and admittedly drunk people, crammed into a few city blocks. There’s nothing quite like it.

Yes, it’s exhausting, and in some cases, horribly destructive. But despite the heavily-branded, free booze-fueled chaos, there’s something worthwhile. A sense of possibility and connection that is rare in the city of Austin (despite its advocates who want to sell you expensive condos in gentrified neighborhoods,) and opportunities to forge personal connections that cannot be replicated by any app, no matter how disruptive said hypothetical app is purported to be.

So we leave, our wallets full of business cards and address books full of contacts, but what is irreplaceable is the energy, the proximity, and the people. The sense that others are doing far more than you could imagine. For a few magical/horrible days, we exist in a bubble, dreaming of a better world where we’re all connected physically and digitally.

Certainly, it’s a microcosm of the bubble that the entire tech industry exists within — primarily white, male, and privileged — but there’s something worth saving despite its problematic aspects.

The worst SXSW hangover is the one of possibilities lost, and it’s the one that lingers long after the city returns to its increasingly tenuous state of equilibrium.

In short: yes and no. The Sharing Economy has produced Uber and AirBnB, hardly exemplars of progressivism or radicalism. However, it has also embraced long-neglected communal concepts like coops, coworking and cohousing, open source software and hardware, and resilience through community-based solidarity.

These things can be twisted into some Ayn Rand-ignited fever dream in the wrong hands, but it doesn’t mean that the movement is worthless. What the sharing economy lacks is a consistent, underlying ideology. But that doesn’t mean that the concept is fundamentally flawed, or merely just marketing smoke and mirrors.

The Sharing Economy emerged in response to a number of factors:

* the notion that physical goods and services could be easily traded based on physical proximity, aided by the Internet.

* Social networking (duh)

* The decline of the middle class and the resultant fear and desire to find other sources of income.

* The increasing importance and value of long-standing community resources like coops and libraries

* The increase in freelance and permalance work, and the resulting need to forge a community of people outside of traditional workspaces and social settings

Certainly, the embrace of popular jackasses like Thomas Friedman and Ashton Kucher complicate the picture. And like any emergent grassroots movement that attains a particular amount of resonance, the Sharing Economy will be defined in popular culture by these bullshitters. But their vision does not encompass the scope or potential it represents.

The critics will continue to hatewank via academic critical theory; concurrently the loudest supporters will make asses of themselves as they vaunt some masturbatory libertarian dream.

All the while, people will continue to find new ways to connect and share resources, whether they do so through the internet, libraries, coops, coworking spaces, music clubs, or any other number of places and contexts where people connect and share.

The Sharing Economy, such that it is, is neither a revolution nor a mere marketing pitch. Its qualities and potential have been evident since the inception of p2p online markets like eBay, as have its problematic aspects. And even if its ideological basis remains fuzzy, its relevance — and the positive intentions and actions of the majority of its adherents — do not.

Despite this, the intent and potential of the Sharing Economy can not — and should not — be confined to the handful of startup ignoramuses who believe that the language of sharing can greenwash their money grab.

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/pmdblog/2014/sharing-economy-just-greenwashing-3-0/feed/0http://paulmdavis.com/pmdblog/2014/sharing-economy-just-greenwashing-3-0/EGAD! The Podcasthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/aXGYKLK_AOQ/
Sat, 01 Feb 2014 13:45:49 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1838A new podcast from Leland Cheuk and myself, in which we discuss films, TV, books, comedy, culture, technology, and the (purported) decline of civilization.]]>A new podcast from Leland Cheuk and myself, in which we discuss films, TV, books, comedy, culture, technology, and the (purported) decline of civilization.

Recent Episodes

With the popularity of Watch Dogs, Halt and Catch Fire, Silicon Valley, and their ilk, Leland and Paul discuss the rise of the coder as a hip cultural figure — rebel hackers, iconoclastic visionaries, and brogrammer entrepreneurs. How did people staring at a terminal embody the most relevant cultural figures of our time? And do pop culture portrayals of rebel hackers bear any resemblance to reality?

Books! Paul and Leland chat about the legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as what they’ve been reading, including Lawrence Wright’s Scientology expose and the Pulitzer-winning novel The Goldfinch. Also covered: devil-worshipping rocket engineer Jack Parsons, character-driven science fiction, and why the web browser fails as a reading device.

In this episode, Paul reports back from SXSW — what it’s like to be an attendee who lives in Austin, how SXSW differs from other tech conferences, and how it serves as a microcosm of the cultural and economic bubble the tech industry exists within.

Leland and Paul discuss critical consensus, and what it means when we don’t enjoy cultural works as much as everyone else does. How do cultural works become critical darlings? Are we settling for mediocrity? Are we suffering from social media-fueled groupthink? Or have our intrepid hosts simply grown too old and jaded to experience joy?

In the inaugural episode of EGAD!, Leland and Paul chat about Spike Jonze’s HER: the film, how its vision of artificial intelligence compares to other fictional, real, and hypothetical AI’s, foul-mouthed chatbots, and they imagine if George Saunders or Rod Serling had punched up the film’s script.

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/projects/2014/egad-podcast/2013: Moralizing Technology, Cynical Uplift, and Outright Lieshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/8AlCUvFvjpI/
Sat, 18 Jan 2014 02:24:44 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=17962013 was the year technology was moralized, or rather technologists were called to answer for the moral consequences of their industry’s actions. True, many of said actions were taken by their employers and employers’ housing brokers and the city council leaders of now and past, who have and continue to cynically weigh economic development against the quality of life of the people who already live and work in that city. But a definable target remains a ripe target, no matter the precarity in which we all live, to varying degrees.

2013 was the year some of our hearts were broken by learning a horse bot tweeting lyrical nonsense and links to spam books was actually an “art” project by a couple of savvy marketing professionals. The year a reality show producer hoaxed an internet sensation by capitalizing upon holiday travel angst, general annoyance at entitlement, and predictably, misogyny. That the Republican’s war on science claimed women’s abortion rights in Texas, that murderous ideologues begot virtual, racially-tinged witch hunts, and the priveleged competed for self-aggrandizement or self-loathing.

To us, members of the media-addled, social-sick elite[1], these events prompted arguments over abstractions, debating who gets to define the meaning of reality, shape the rhetoric, and determine appropriate positioning. Our formative educations in critical theory and Clinton-era triangulation have served us well(?) to a point, that point ending at getting a goddammned thing done. We stare it down, turn away in horror, and search for the next outrage to distract us.

But truth and honesty and results do matter, despite the academic debate their abstractions fuel. They matter to the people who read the tweets, blog posts, magazine interviews, and take them at face value. To the people whose lifestyle is validated by characters on reality shows. To all of us who consume this content half-passively in the social professional digital net that suffuses our daily lives. To all of us who live in the world of ideas and code and networks and things on our screen, yet also live in the world of people and things.

In some small way, these tweets and posts and sensationalistic and/or earnest think pieces shape how we understand this ever-shifting world. And there is an aggregate impact, one I believe is increasingly corrosive.

Filtering the crap out has become a part-time job, a constant process of increasing ones’ literacy of a language and discourse that is constantly, simultaneously, evolving and devolving. Which is inevitable, considering the rate at which these things shift and mutate now, but this crowdsourced dive to the bottom only serves to make the worthwhile, meaningful, and painfully true all the more rare and precious.

[1]: “Elite” meaning two paychecks away from homelessness.

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/pmdblog/2014/2013-moralizing-technology-cynical-uplift-outright-lies/SXSW 2014 Panel: Taking it to the Street — Neighborhood as Interfacehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/zDx6SgX274E/
Thu, 16 Jan 2014 06:43:36 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1785A SXSW Interactive 2014 panel organized by Emily Wright and myself, featuring Jake Levitas of the City of San Francisco's Innovation Office. Civic technologists, engaged artists, and makers are doing amazing things in their own silos. This panel asked and imagined what can happen when these neighbors and creators step out of their spaces and collaborate?]]>

A SXSW Interactive 2014 panel organized by Emily Wright and myself, featuring Jake Levitas of the City of San Francisco's Innovation Office. Civic technologists, engaged artists, and makers are doing amazing things in their own silos. This panel asked and imagined what can happen when these neighbors and creators step out of their spaces and collaborate?

Civic technologists, engaged artists, and makers are doing amazing things in their own silos, but what can happen when neighbors and creators step out of their spaces and collaborate? On a grassroots, neighborhood-by-neighborhood level, there’s great opportunity for civic technologists to collaborate with artists engaged in social practice, and for makers to prototype new products, interfaces, and experiences in urban spaces.

Our panel is a dialogue between these creators, exploring what can happen when civic-minded coders, artists, and makers work together. We’ll look at models like the Urban Prototyping festival, examples like SMS controlled holiday lights and DIY traffic counters, and discuss how to connect developers and artists for projects that reimagine their neighborhoods.

During the panel, we'll be addressing these key questions: What are some real examples of people using technology and urban prototypes to create and measure urban impact? How has civic tech and local hacking changed the way City Governments approach solving urban challenges? How long has the civic tech and urban prototyping been happening, and what's next? Which services (APIs and open source hardware) are most useful and cost effective for civic projects? Which platforms (mapping, data collection, hosting, etc) are the most well-suited for civic projects? What makes an urban prototype successful? How have they gathered momentum?

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/projects/2014/sxsw-2014-panel-taking-street-neighborhood-interface/Cryptid Planet!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/setNCwfmgkQ/
Wed, 25 Sep 2013 14:06:16 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1844An interactive map of the mysterious and mythical beasts reputed to exist around the world. Where do they lie in wait, those hours before you wake?]]>

An interactive map of the mysterious and mythical beasts reputed to exist around the world. Where do they lie in wait, those hours before you wake?

Developed the information architecture, strategy, and content for microsite featuring Pivotal's Data Science team, its services, case studies, whitepapers, and links to the open source data science community.

New Play Map Stories will present interactive narratives that track the life of new works of theater, from their conception to workshops and premieres, as well as following productions around the United States.

]]>http://paulmdavis.com/projects/2013/new-play-map-stories/Steve Jobs Is Dead, And So Is My Dad: Two Very Different Silicon Valley Storieshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/paulmdavis/~3/WLjWxK76dMA/
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:25:35 +0000http://warningsignmedia.com/paulmdavis/?p=1914My Dad died five years ago, and I often dream of him. Two nights ago, I awoke from a dream in which I was attending a 70th birthday celebration in his honor. In a large field in Cupertino, the size of a high school football field, hundreds of people had come to salute him, for his Steve Jobs- or Bill Gates-level contributions to the computer industry. He was recognized, and loved, and this was his day.

Since learning of Steve Jobs’ death last night, I’ve been working through my conflicted emotions about this influential but problematic figure, and thinking a lot about my Dad and that dream.

In real life, my Dad died before he turned 70, was survived by his small immediate family and a handful of acquaintances, and did not transform the tech industry or the world in the way that Jobs or Gates did. He was a casualty of the Silicon Valley’s youth-obsessed culture and its rapacious drive to constantly produce more product for less money, human cost be damned.

Like Jobs, my Dad was a college dropout. He learned his trade by repairing hardware during battles as a Marine serving in Vietnam. After the end of the war, he got a job in the nascent computer industry, a heady time when law-breaking phone phreaks like Steve Wozniak were on the cusp of becoming millionares, and the industry was open to just about anyone with an interest and some technical know-how. My Dad worked his way up as a software engineer in an industry that was very different than it is now, with employees expecting that they would grow old comfortably working at the same company. When I was very young, he was a well-paid project manager at a Motorola subsidiary located in the same building that now houses Apple’s world headquarters, an office park since given the iconic name “1 Infinte Loop”. We had a large house in the pricy Santa Cruz suburb of Aptos, and I remember eagerly awaiting Christmas mornings where it seemed that no expense had been spared.

In the mid-’80s, his division was shut down and my Dad was laid off. Unlike Jobs, he did not enjoy a golden parachute or late-career comeback. Instead, he was told at the many job interviews he went to that his experience left him overqualified, that his lack of a college or advanced degree left him underqualified, or that he was too old, in euphemistic terms. He doggedly applied for jobs that paid much less than he was worth, for entry-level positions, but there was no place for unconventional backgrounds or desperation in the newly minted, efficiency-obsessed tech industry of the mid ’80s.

For the following two decades, until his death in 2006, my Dad had no choice but to take minimum-wage service jobs, often two at a time, to support his family — his wife, my Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother, and myself, his only son. He worked at 7-11, as a security guard, and as the desk attendant at a hotel, and never let his pride or the fact that he was capable of so much more get in his way. The large house in Aptos was sold, and we relocated to small apartments in also-expensive Cupertino and Sunnyvale. During my first two years of high school, the four of us shared a one-bedroom apartment as my parents struggled make ends meet.

Having grown up watching my father’s hardships, I long harbored a resentment for the Valley’s culture and ethics, alongside my enduring admiration for my Dad’s perseverance, hard work, and commitment to doing a great job, no matter how menial that job that might have been. I spent my twenties with little direction other than a firm belief that I would never join the tech industry. During the dot com boom, I served coffee to 18-year-olds who were so flush that they would tip for their drinks with five-dollar bills. I sneered at the Lexus-driving, commuting yuppies who would visit my Santa Cruz coffee shop and behave like they were kings of the world. As my twenties ground down, I became less sure of the path my life was on, but remained emphatic that I would never enter the computer industry. However, that entire time I was my father’s son, and loved tinkering with computers, keeping up on new software and gadgets, and never doubted that computers and the Internet were the most important and revolutionary forces of my time, for good, bad and ambiguous ends.

Like my Dad, Steve Jobs entered the tech industry from an unconventional background, as did many in the ’70s. His path in the unforgiving Silicon Valley tech industry was much different from my father’s. By all rights, that long-harbored grudge that I have long held against the Valley’s culture and its cannibalistic business practices should be directed at Jobs right now. Yet I find myself more affected by his death than I could have expected. Since I woke from a feverish nap yesterday evening to hear the news on Twitter, I’ve been trying to parse out why this is. Though I understand and respect people’s grief over the death of deceased famous figures, it’s rare that I share it. I feel no personal intimate connection to Steve Jobs the man, yet I’m still profoundly affected by his death.

Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in Cupertino, Sunnyvale and (to a lesser degree) Santa Cruz, Jobs’ figure loomed large. While in elementary school, I wrote and published a neighborhood newspaper on my Apple IIc using a primitive precursor to PageMaker. This is how I first expressed my passion for writing, publishing, and DIY projects. Some years later, I attended Homestead High School, where Jobs had once attended, a place where he and Wozniak’s presences loomed over a decade later. One of my teachers often lamented that he had once turned down an offer to invest in the company Jobs and Wozniak were creating in a garage, to his regret. As a member of the high school newspaper, I learned many of the writing, editing and layout skills I use today during the many hours I spent staring at a monochrome Mac display in a stuffy, ad-hoc production room built in the corner of a classroom.

In the years after, I switched Windows machines, which were all I could afford as a college student, and later as a low-paid customer service employee and aspiring musician. Though I secrety coveted the industrial design of friends’ sleek MacBooks, I adopted many of the staunch self-rationalizations common to committed Windows users—that Macs were toys for the rich and the fashion-obsessed which allowed for less customization and didn’t “really” let you get under the hood. I defended every Windows machine I bought, even though each one had components die within weeks of their warrantees expiring, requiring that I dismantle and repair the system myself, or that I spend hours Googling for obscure registry repairs and mysteriously-vanished hardware drivers.

As an underemployed twenty-something with little direction and a lot of time, this was novel for a few years, though I had no interest in becoming an IT person or learning more than was necessary to fix a system failure. After I became employed in much more time- and energy-consuming jobs, and came to realize how much I disliked repairing hardware, messing with registry settings, or looking at code, the customizability and cheap components of Windows machines ceased to be novel and became time-wasting impediments to my ability to do what I wanted and needed to do with machines that were no longer a hobby, but were now a necessary tool. A year ago I swallowed my long-time Windows user pride and bought a MacBook, and while there are a few design elements in Windows that I still prefer, I haven’t regretted the switch.

Yet even when I was at my staunchest point of Windows advocacy, I recognized Jobs’ outsized impact on the world we live in. The fingerprints of his vision, influence, design philosophy, and drive to iterate are on every graphic user interface, computer, or mobile device we use today. We take these things for granted, but without Jobs, they would look very differently. If it wasn’t for Jobs emphasizing throughout his career that hardware and software should be made for normal people, not engineers—for designers and writers and artists and filmmakers and musicians and administrative workers and retirees—the computers and devices and user interfaces we use every day would probably look a lot more like Microsoft and Google at their most user-unfriendly and engineer-centric.

And now is as good a time as any to raise them. Jobs’s life is no more valuable than those of the FoxConn workers who committed suicide, or the children in the Congo who mine the conflict minerals that are potentially in our mobile devices and the electric cars that dominate the Valley. If his death brings more attention to these pressing issues, that would be a ghoulish, but ultimately positive, catalyst.

However, there’s no need for moral posturing, the scolding of people who are processing a torrent of news in real time, or suggestions that being affected by Jobs’ death somehow negates ones’ ability to also care about his failings, the tech industry’s abhorrent labor practices in the third world, the brutalities of globalization, Occupy Wall Street, or the death of civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Within minutes of Jobs’ death, my social media timelines filled up with expressions of surprise and grief, alongside sentiments of disgust and outrage that people were expressing grief for a captain of industry while Occupy Wall Street protestors were being beaten by cops. There were admonitions that Jobs was a ‘sweatshop slavemaster’ not worthy of being honored.

In a recent post for the Rumpus, “The Week Social Media Broke My Heart”, Manjula Martin writes about the social media responses to the near-simultaneous execution of Troy Davis, the breakup of R.E.M., and the Facebook redesign. She wrestles with the common impulse to become what I’d call a “social media scold” during times of breaking news:

…Some things are a bigger deal than others and it’s good to have perspective. White people like indie rock and are not frequently killed by our government. I got it. But also … something about the mean-spiritedness of it all didn’t sit right with me. Why are we so invested in judging each other’s real-time filtering of current events online? Of course a rock band breaking up isn’t as important as Troy Davis being killed. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t touched in real and important ways by it.

Even more troubling are the suggestions that it’s hypocritical for those with a social conscience to be moved by Jobs’ passing and accomplishments. The Internet’s a uniquely efficient tool for engaging in moral posturing and calling out perceived hypocrisy. It’s not as great at encompassing nuance, contradiction, or human imperfection.

All of us who exist in social media’s liminial space between newscaster and news consumer live in fear of being labeled hypocrites. That fear has a toxic effect on our psyches and limits the complex, evolving, and inherently contradictory people that we are. It stands in the way of us taking risks or expressing ourselves earnestly. It limits us, and distorts our own humanity. AsMerlin Mann succinctly puts it, the best you can attempt is to be the “hypocrite you can live with”.

As someone who has done my fair share of moral posturing on social media over the years, and only reconsidered after being turned off by the torrent of tweeted recriminations that followed the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, I know that playing the social media scold is tempting and briefly satisfying. But that self-satisfaction curdles next morning: it doesn’t enlighten or inform people, it merely shames those who are also processing the same breaking news, in different ways than yourself. This isn’t high school debate team; we are engaging an unprecedented form of media with few established social norms, in which we are all simultaneously creators and consumers of news, in which we think and work through events publicly, in real time, a process rife with conflict and contradiction and emotion.

Today, many people who never met Jobs who feel affected by his death are writing articles and blog posts, and sending well-wishes to his friends and family. If you are not moved, or if you consider him a “sweatshop owner” or a modern “robber baron”, I share your concerns, even if those aren’t the terms I would use. But instead of chiding those who are articulating their grief about Jobs’s passing, let me suggest that you write a letter or call the company that manufactured the device you are reading this on — be it Apple, Dell, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Amazon, HP, or one of the many other companies that share the same manufacturing and supply chains — and let them know that as a customer, you demand products that are not manufactured in sweatshops with materials sourced by children from war-torn third world countries, and that you’re willing to pay more for these devices if necessary. Try to educate others about these issues, and what they can do. But don’t be a dick about it.

Even if you find it ridiculous that people are emotionally affected by the death of a famous billionaire, if you find these outpourings of grief distasteful or disingenuous, many of us still sincerely feel affected by his death, for many different and often conflicting reasons. I have no personal connection to Steve Jobs the man, and have many critiques of his business practices, products, and the company he built, which I will continue to write about and discuss. But despite my many reservations, I feel his influence in the tools I use every waking hour of the day, which I have developed an intimate and even emotional relationship with, for better and worse.

To Steve Jobs, thank you for making products and user interfaces with impeccable design taste and great vision, for your commitment to excellence and iteration, for making the ethos of “the intersection of technology and liberal arts” more than a slick PR line, and thank you for saving us non-engineers from the goddamn command line and endlessly nested menus. Your accomplishments have had a profound effect on my life. To his friends and family, my sympathies, and to those also touched by his work and his life, I commiserate.

Steve Jobs died at 56, my Dad died at 63, both too young. Jobs’ vision suffuses the tools I use every hour of every day. I feel my Dad’s absence in every moment. Steve Jobs was one of the winners of the new economy, while my Dad was not. As I see the people taking to the streets who, like my Dad, ended up on the losing side of capitalism despite their best efforts, I’m reminded of the empty office parks that now surround my Mom’s Sunnyvale house like a spectre of a near-future dystopia, of the tech industry specialists near retirement age whose jobs were outsourced or cut years ago and now greet me when I enter the Sunnyvale Home Depot, if they’re one of the few fortunate ones to have found a service industry job. These are the casualties of a world-changing industry largely modeled in the image of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs and Gates are far from heroes, but they have still had a profound effect on the lives of us all, and that cannot be denied. I will not ignore or deny Jobs’ failings, but I will certainly recognize his accomplishments.